1.2

As I wondered how such a thing could happen, a terrible pain shot through my head and I began to feel dizzy. Images flashed before my eyes, each one more blood-curdling and unbearable than the last. First I saw that I had been drugged, and the moments when I lost control of my whole body were as clear as if they had just happened. The sensation in my hands was gone, my muscles were unable to function, I collapsed on the floor. I looked around in fear and panic, and men I had never seen before appeared in my room. I was picked up like a rag doll and carried to the bathroom in my room. I was left in the bathtub full of water in. Some of the water in the bathtub overflowed and spilled on the floor, but the water flowing from the open fountain continued to fill the bathtub. I could not breathe, and every time I opened my mouth to breathe, I swallowed water.

A fine pain appeared in my wrists.

The colour of the water covering my vision turned slightly pink and then red. Because the men had made cuts on my wrists.

I looked as if I was trying to take my own life.

After the red, darkness fell. There was nothing left for me but eternal darkness.

I had been killed.

It was devastating to regain my last forgotten memories.

Everything I didn't want to remember kept flooding my mind. Even when I raised my head and looked in the mirror, I saw these moments over and over again. It was like a torment and I couldn't stop.I hit the mirror hard with a hard object and shattered it.

The mirror shards landed on the floor with a thud.

All my torment stopped at that moment.

All sounds were silenced and the images stopped.

The door of the room opened.

Three young women in maid's clothes came in. Feeling too exhausted to give them any reaction, I watched their astonished looks without reacting.

"Our Lady is awake!" one of them was saying. The language she spoke had sound combinations I had never heard before in my life, a different language that should have been incomprehensible to me, but strangely I had no trouble understanding what her words meant.

"Call the doctor to come immediately. Go!"

The youngest of the women ran out of the room as if obeying this order and disappeared in the corridor behind the door.

"Are you all right, My Lady?" the young woman with the short blunt haircut asked as she approached me. "How are you feeling?"

I was the focus of her worried eyes, but I found it difficult to take her question personally.

The maid continued to approach. I tried to back away, uncomfortable with the intrusion into my space, but in the meantime I heard a cracking sound and felt a sting in my hand. When I looked up, I saw the new cuts I had sustained, as if the wounds I had sustained were not enough. Large and small pieces of the mirror were lodged in the back of my hand. My hands were covered in blood. My blood was dripping on the floor and on me, my fingertips were tingling. Strangely, this situation still haunts me.

I was someone who had tasted the cold, numb touch of death.

"Oh my... My lady, please stop. Your hands are bleeding!"

I didn't let her touch my hand. I didn't even know who she was yet. I had opened my eyes in the body of a small and injured girl, although I didn't know how. But how had this child become like this? How could I know whether this woman had done it or not?

I grabbed a piece of mirror in my hand and pointed it at her. Ignoring the blood flowing from my hand, I started shouting, "Get away from me! Who the hell are you? I'm telling you not to come closer!"

Ignoring my words, the woman continued to approach, but the other woman came and stopped her, perhaps she realised how serious I was in my warning, I was ready to make anyone who tried to touch me pay for it. The women moved away from me without taking their worried eyes off me. "Our Lady must not be feeling well," one of them was saying to the other in a whisper I could hear. "Let's wait until the doctor comes."

Tears began to well up in the eyes of the woman with the bobbed hair. "But the hand... is it right to leave it like that? Can't you see it's bleeding badly?"

"... I left her alone for five minutes because she had been asleep for a long time. It's all because of me. How can I explain it now? Look how Our Lady looks. It's all my fault."

"No, it's not your fault. She must have been a little shocked and frightened by the accident. Her father, His Highness the Duke, even though he sacrificed his own life to protect our lady..." His eyes flickered, and he put her hand over her mouth.

"Still... What are we going to do now? The head housekeeper and our lady's nanny have been sacked. Even the knights have been arrested. What will be the future of the castle if something happens to our lady? You know the behaviour of the baron and baroness, what happens to us if we refuse to obey their rules? They have already expelled many of our friends and replaced them with others. We don't have a ..." they kept talking, but their dialogue made no sense to me.

What accident?

The duke?

The castle?

Baron, Baroness?

It's stuck in their tongues. The Lady. The Lady. Lady... Lines, attitudes, clothes, as if from some kind of medieval drama...

But it all felt too real to be a dream.

I tried to be calm and rational and I couldn't take it anymore. "Who are you and what is this place?" I asked.

The women looked at each other. They looked at each other and started talking among themselves. Even if their tongues stopped, their eyes did not stop. The longer this went on, the more annoyed I became, so I raised my voice and asked once more, "WHO ARE YOU AND WHERE AM I?"

"M-my dear," squeaked the maid, her curly bangs sticking out of the bonnet on her head, "W-we are your servants. I'm Mandy and she's Ruby. This-this is Castle Averia in the north, your home, my lady. Don't you remember?"

Averia? It sounded familiar, but I wasn't willing to admit where. How could such a thing be?

Even if I was afraid of the answer I would hear, I couldn't run away. "So... who am I?"

"My lady..." Both women's eyes were filled with tears. They both answered my question in unison.

"You are Elisa Averia."

"Elisa?"

"Yes." "Yes."

"Averia?"

"Yes?" "Yes?"

I swore with a mouthful of swear words and stunned the servants. At the same time, I was laughing. I pressed my lips together and tried to stop the laughter rising inside me, but I failed and continued laughing like crazy. So much so that tears flowed from the corner of my eyes.

"Don't make fun of me," I said while wiping the tears from my eyes.

"How dare we..."

I turned my back to them, ignoring their speeches rising in unison. I took a large piece of mirror on the floor and held it to my face. My new face. Maybe they weren't making fun of me, but someone was definitely messing with me. Why else... Why was I going through this? Why should I be in her shoes? How was that even possible?

I shouldn't have been surprised that the name Averia sounded familiar because, like everything else, it was one of the details I made up and wrote down for my novel. In my novel 'The Fire of Prophecy', the dynasty that ruled the north was called Averia. They were blessed with silver hair and blue-grey eyes, just like the eyes looking into the mirror fragment I was holding in my hand. Marcus, the illegitimate born male protagonist, the future owner of the duchy, had a half-sister who died before reaching the age of eighteen, and whose name was Elisa Averia. I didn't write more than a few lines about the character, she wasn't very important in the development of the story. She was an expendable side character.

She was condemned to a slow death by her uncle, who wanted to seize the duchy and all the wealth it possessed...

Leaving aside how unrealistic it is to open your eyes to a new life and replace one of the characters of a novel, I wondered why I was a side character who existed only to support the story and not Rheana, the main female character, or one of the evil female characters. I hadn't told much about Elisa Averia, I hadn't even written a single sentence of dialogue for us to get to know her. I hadn't felt uncomfortable when I was writing about her death, I hadn't thought much about it, but now... I, Ela Demirhan, had entered the fantasy novel I had written, and I had become Elisa Averia herself, who was destined to be killed at a young age.

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